A Visit to Great Smoky Mountain National Park

When our son and family headed off to Florida for spring break week, Brett and I found ourselves with some time on our hands and decided to visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a long-held goal for us. We checked weather forecasts for the week and chose what we believed would be the best possible day for a visit, made a reservation to stay at a hotel in Knoxville the evening before, and off we went.

Our goal was to visit Cades (pronounced kay-dees) Cove, the most popular area of the park and the most accessible location for us, just an hour’s drive out of Knoxville. A cove was, in the language of the area, a relatively flat valley between mountains or ridges. Cades Cove was a farming community, with a population of around 125 families in 1900.

Great Smoky Mountain National Park was established in 1934, although the work to create the park started many years before that. Great Smoky Mountain National Park is renowned for its biological diversity, the beauty of the ancient mountains, and the quality of its remnants of Southern Appalachian mountain culture. It is America’s most visited national park.

The current paved one-way loop road around Cades Cove was once an 11-mile two-way unpaved road for residents, with entrance to the Cove available on five narrow unpaved roads. Today only one entrance exists.

Views of the park from around the loop. We crossed loads of rushing streams as we drove around.

We could not have picked a more beautiful day to visit. The skies were clear and blue, and the temperature cool without being cold. Visitor numbers were light as well. When we picked up our guidebook at the beginning of the tour we were told the loop tour would take us around 45 minutes or so, but we stopped at several places along the way and spent around two hours overall in the Cove before heading out of the park and home (the driving tour can take over four hours in the summer and fall when visitors are at their peak). Wildlife is abundant in Cades Cove year round, and we saw geese, elk, and flocks of wild turkeys (but thankfully no skunks or snakes). Even with visitors and cars moving along the loop we could also hear large birds calling in the distance, but weren’t sure what they were.

Cades Cove contained small mountain communities where farming was done. Sorghum was a typical crop, and the tools used to process it in one community have been preserved as well as a grist mill and its mill run, two barns (cantilever and drive-through), the smokehouse, some homes, the blacksmith’s shed, and more. The last resident of Cades Cove was Kermit Caughron, who died in 1999.

National parks are mostly all about the natural world, but Great Smoky Mountains NP does a wonderful job of showing human respect and care for the nature they co-existed with. Long before white settlers arrived indigenous people lived in Smokies for thousands of years, but all lived in the mountains with apparently little impact on the natural world that surrounded them.

Our little pup had the time of his life in the park, either being outdoors, running through a meadow, or just hanging out the window to observe and sniff the air. We enjoyed a picnic by a rushing stream before we left Great Smoky Mountain NP, Brett added to his national park t-shirt collection, and I got to scratch another national park off my poster. All in all, an absolutely wonderful visit!